I think there was a golden period for embedded systems and other non-Java developers that started about 10 years ago but maybe it's over, not sure since I'm not working in that space right now.
A lot of vendors wrote Eclipse plugins instead of doing their own IDE and everybody won. You could integrate auto-complete, compiler errors, source control and debugging all in one IDE with a little hand-tuning. You can get this to work across multiple toolchains, not just gcc. Sure, Eclipse is a hog but it still seemed better than having three ugly and buggier vendor IDEs on your machine.
A lot of vendors wrote Eclipse plugins instead of doing their own IDE and everybody won. You could integrate auto-complete, compiler errors, source control and debugging all in one IDE with a little hand-tuning. You can get this to work across multiple toolchains, not just gcc. Sure, Eclipse is a hog but it still seemed better than having three ugly and buggier vendor IDEs on your machine.